Immigration Reduces Crime Rates - per study (1 Viewer)

[Sabine]

The article deals with legal immigration, if you click on the "immigrants" tab included in the article.

Raking In Welfare Not Key For U.S. Citizenship Seekers | LiveScience

Reb, tabs in the article are not to related subparts or material of value to the original article posted. For example, if you click on "crime" you'll get an article that discusses the 1,000 fingerprinting mistakes made each year - not how crime is defined for the purposes of the subject study. Saintkev could not have determined that the study concerned legal immigrants by clicking on the "immigration" tab, as the linked article is not related to the original article as far as I can tell.

The second article I posted is what I should have posted originally, but I didn't find it until after I started the thread and went digging for more detail.

 

[RSF]

I agree that immigration reduces crime rates simply because Mexicans take lots of siestas and sleeping people don't usually commit crimes.

 

[LSSpam]

Not necessarily. I agree with you that it is a bit presumptious to assume that a demographic change, save for a pretty momentous one--would affect the economic health of a country or community one way or another, but regardless of the United States's economic health, it'll still be a popular entrepot for immigrants, especially from improvished nations whereby the economic opportunities are virtually nil.

I maybe misunderstanding this but I think you're misunderstanding me.

I wasn't talking strictly in regards to the economy. My point was that both violent crime and immigration follow the economy, i.e. when the economy goes up, immigration goes up and violent crime goes down.

It's a "correlation does not suggest causation". Immigration and Violent Crime, if put up on charts side-by-side, would be correlated. But it's not because one causes the other. The "cause" would be economic well being. Employment probably being the most specific factor.

 

[RebSaint]

Reb, tabs in the article are not to related subparts or material of value to the original article posted. For example, if you click on "crime" you'll get an article that discusses the 1,000 fingerprinting mistakes made each year - not how crime is defined for the purposes of the subject study. Saintkev could not have determined that the study concerned legal immigrants by clicking on the "immigration" tab, as the linked article is not related to the original article as far as I can tell.

The second article I posted is what I should have posted originally, but I didn't find it until after I started the thread and went digging for more detail.

Well then I need to apologize to kev--I had assumed by not reading the entire piece that the study regarding crime dealt with illegal immigration.

 

[RebSaint]

I maybe misunderstanding this but I think you're misunderstanding me.

I wasn't talking strictly in regards to the economy. My point was that both violent crime and immigration follow the economy, i.e. when the economy goes up, immigration goes up and violent crime goes down.

It's a "correlation does not suggest causation". Immigration and Violent Crime, if put up on charts side-by-side, would be correlated. But it's not because one causes the other. The "cause" would be economic well being. Employment probably being the most specific factor.

I think we partially agree here.

I would argue that a good economy doesn't at all effect immigration. Individuals from Kenya, Haiti, Mexico, Europe or wherever are going to come to this country regardless, save for a complete economic collapse. That said, demographic changes, unless they're fairly momentous, are not likely to really affect the economy one way or the other.

I would agree that violent crime diminishes as the economy improves.

Of course, we aren't privy to the study, but I suspect there are connections between crime and immigration independent of economic well-being that the study fleshes out which we aren't able to see.

 

[Sabine]

I maybe misunderstanding this but I think you're misunderstanding me.

I wasn't talking strictly in regards to the economy. My point was that both violent crime and immigration follow the economy, i.e. when the economy goes up, immigration goes up and violent crime goes down.

It's a "correlation does not suggest causation". Immigration and Violent Crime, if put up on charts side-by-side, would be correlated. But it's not because one causes the other. The "cause" would be economic well being. Employment probably being the most specific factor.

From the article:

Another concern of social scientists is common sources of causation, or “competing” explanations. One candidate is economic trends. After all, potential immigrants respond to incentives and presumably choose to relocate when times are better in their destinations. Although a legitimate concern, economics can’t easily explain the story. Depending on the measure, economic trends aren’t isomorphic with either immigration or crime at either the beginning or end of the time series. Real wages were declining and inequality increasing in the 1990s by most accounts, which should have produced increases in crime by the logic of relative deprivation theory, which says that income gaps, not absolute poverty, are what matters. Broad economic indicators like stock market values did skyrocket but collapsed sharply while immigration didn’t.
Scholars in criminology have long searched for a sturdy link between national economic trends and violence, to little avail. The patterns just don’t match up well, and often they’re in the opposite direction of deprivation-based expectations. The best example is the 1960s when the economy markedly improved yet crime shot up. Don’t forget, too, the concentrated immigration and crime link remains when controlling for economic indicators.
Finally, the “Latino Paradox” in itself should put to rest the idea that economics is the go-to answer: Immigrant Latinos are poor and disadvantaged but at low risk for crime. Poor immigrant neighborhoods and immigrant-tinged cities like El Paso have similarly lower crime than their economic profile would suggest.Competing explanations also can’t explain the Chicago findings. Immigrant youths committed less violence than natives after adjustment for a rich set of individual, family, and neighborhood confounders. Moreover, there’s an influence of immigrant concentration beyond the effects of individual immigrant status and other individual factors, and beyond neighborhood socioeconomic status and legal cynicism—previously shown to significantly predict violence.

Notably, we found a significantly lower rate of violence among Mexican-Americans compared to blacks and whites. A major reason is that more than a quarter of those of Mexican descent were born abroad and more than half lived in neighborhoods where the majority of residents were also Mexican. In particular, first-generation immigrants (those born outside the United States) were 45 percent less likely to commit violence than third-generation Americans, adjusting for individual, family, and neighborhood background. Second-generation immigrants were 22 percent less likely to commit violence than the third generation. This pattern held true for non-Hispanic whites and blacks as well. Our study further showed living in a neighborhood of concentrated immigration was directly associated with lower violence (again, after taking into account a host of correlated factors, including poverty and an individual’s immigrant status).

Crime in Los Angeles dropped considerably in the late 1990s (45 percent overall) as did other Hispanic influenced cities such as San Jose, Dallas, and Phoenix. The same can be said for cities smack on the border like El Paso and San Diego, which have long ranked as low-crime areas. Cities of concentrated immigration are some of the safest places around.

 

[Sabine]

The idea that the presence of immigrants lowers crime in other demographics is, frankly, absurd.

I have seen this play out in Port Arthur, Texas. Around the late 70's, Port Arthur was headed towards becoming a ghost town. It was primarily a refinery and port town that suffered white flight during desegregation and job losses, and the crime rate rose. People fled from the city, and real estate prices plunged. Vietnamese immigrants moved in and established themselves there. They formed systems that allowed the Vietnamese community to grow, such as for banking/financing and churches that used their language. As those empty houses started filling back up and more life returned to the city, the crime rate dropped. Some other groups moved in, and some that left during the downturn moved back.

The article addresses how this is one way in which immigration has had an affect on crime rates across different groups. It's sort of like taking over crime's playground and establishing a new code of conduct.

We’re so used to thinking about immigrant adaptation (or assimilation) to the host society we’ve failed to fully appreciate how immigrants themselves shape the host society. Take economic revitalization and urban growth. A growing consensus argues immigration revitalizes cities around the country. Many decaying inner-city areas gained population in the 1990s and became more vital, in large part through immigration. One of the most thriving scenes of economic activity in the entire Chicagoland area, for example, second only to the famed “Miracle Mile” of Michigan Avenue, is the 26th Street corridor in Little Village. A recent analysis of New York City showed that for the first time ever, blacks’ incomes in Queens have surpassed whites’, with the surge in the black middle class driven largely by the successes of black immigrants from the West Indies. Segregation and the concentration of poverty have also decreased in many cities for the first time in decades.

Such changes are a major social force and immigrants aren’t the only beneficiaries—native born blacks, whites, and other traditional groups in the United States have been exposed to the gains associated with lower crime (decreases in segregation, decreases in concentrated poverty, increases in the economic and civic health of central cities, to name just a few). There are many examples of inner-city neighborhoods rejuvenated by immigration that go well beyond Queens and the Lower West Side of Chicago. From Bushwick in Brooklyn to Miami, and from large swaths of south central Los Angeles to the rural South, immigration is reshaping America. It follows that the “externalities” associated with immigration are multiple in character and constitute a plausible mechanism explaining some of the variation in crime rates of all groups in the host society.

 

[TDH]

It makes sense. Immigrants come here with less so they're used to living with less.

 

[Sabine]

Here's another article about a different, recent immigration/crime study that deals with California.

Immigration and Crime
The Boston Globe

By Jeff Jacoby Globe Columnist / March 5, 2008 WARMING to one of his favorite themes the other night, CNN's Lou Dobbs repeatedly invoked the phrase "criminal illegal aliens," as he did his best to feed the stereotype that illegal immigrants drive up crime. Dobbs's relentless spleen on this subject, of course, has won him a following. Seal-the-borders nativism won't get anyone elected president - just ask ex-GOP candidates Tom Tancredo, Mitt Romney, and Rudy Giuliani - but there is no denying it's good for TV ratings.

Fortunately, politicians and television personalities aren't the only people interested in immigration and crime. A new study from the Public Policy Institute of California offers significantly more substance on the topic than anything you're likely to encounter on cable TV or in the presidential campaign.

The paper, by economists Kristin F. Butcher and Anne Morrison Piehl, assesses the impact of immigration on crime by analyzing data from California, which has by far the nation's largest population of prison inmates: One-eighth of all state prisoners in the United States are incarcerated in California, as are 30 percent of all inmates who are not American citizens. What Butcher and Piehl demonstrate is that immigrants, far from being more likely to end up behind bars, are dramatically less likely to do so.

The numbers are striking: While immigrants (legal and illegal) account for 35 percent of California adults, they represent just 17 percent of the state's prisoners. Men born in the United States are incarcerated in California prisons at more than 2½ times the rate of foreign-born men. Within the age group most often involved in crime (ages 18 to 40), US natives - astonishingly - are 10 times more likely to be in prison or jail than immigrants (4.2 percent of the former are in correctional institutions, and just 0.42 percent of the latter). Even when the focus is narrowed to inmates who were born in Mexico and are not citizens - the demographic group most likely to include illegal immigrants - the rate of incarceration is only one-eighth that of men born in the United States....................

Immigration and crime - The Boston Globe